« All flat maps, and I am one » : Cartographic References
in the Poems of John Donne
Ladan NIAYESH
Université de Paris 7 - Jussieu
As A. E. Nordenskiöld reminds us, the maps, connected with
the oldest editions of the Geography of the second century
Alexandrian astronomer, mathematician and geographer Claudius
Ptolemaeus, known as Ptolemy, "constitute the prototype of almost all
geographical atlases, published since the discovery of the art of
printing"1. For a modern viewer, it is often hard to imagine
cartographers using anything but the cartographic alphabet inherited
from Ptolemy, with, for instance, the Ptolemaic orientation placing the
north above and the east to the right. As Nordenskiöld goes on to
notice, the method of denoting boundaries between lands and seas,
mountain ranges, rivers and towns, used in old manuscripts of
Ptolemy’s work and in his oldest printed editions is still followed by
cartographers today, with only slight variations. Yet, he objects, if we
compare our atlases, on the one hand with the maps of Ptolemy, and
on the other hand with most medieval maps not influenced by the
work of the Alexandrian geographer, we will find this cartographic
alphabet to be at times as conventional and arbitrary as that of the
primarily symbolic and dogmatic Mappae mundi produced in the
West during the Middle Ages.
Despite minor variations, most of those Medieval maps
belong more or less indirectly either to the Macrobian or to the
Tripartite or Noachid traditions2. Macrobian maps were named after
1
A. E. Nordenskiöld, Facsimile-Atlas to the Early History of Cartography (New
York: Dover Publications, 1889 ; 1973), p. 1.
2
For an example of a map related to the Macrobian tradition, see the woodcut made
after John of Holywood’s 13th-century manuscript and reproduced in R. V. Tooley’s
Landmarks of Mapmaking (Oxford: Phaidon, 1968 ; 1976), p. 14. For an example of a
Tripartite or Noachid map, see the earliest printed world map, in an edition of Isidore
of Seville’s Etymologiarum (Augsburg : Günther Zainer, 1472), reproduced in David
© Études Épistémè, n° 10 (automne 2006). Reproduction, même partielle, interdite
sans autorisation
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the Roman geographer Aurelius Macrobius, who lived at the end of
the 4th and the beginning of the 5th century. His Interpretatio in
Somnium Scipionis contains, besides essays on different metaphysical
and cosmographical topics, some geographical speculations in the
second book, the meaning of which was explained by means of a map.
Macrobius considered the (spherical) earth to be divided by the oceancurrents into a series of more or less inhabitable zones or belts (five,
or subsequently seven). The equatorial zone which separates the
northern and southern hemispheres he considered to be a sea which
heat made impossible to cross, while the extreme cold of the north and
south poles rendered those areas equally inhospitable in his view.
Those three areas (equatorial sea, north and south poles) were seen by
Macrobius as well as by many medieval authorities after him as the
home of many monstrous races (one-eyed Cyclops, one-footed
Sciopods, dark-skinned Ethiops, Blemmyes bearing their heads in
their chests, diminutive Pygmies, monstrous Giants, etc.) whose
physical and consequently moral difformity was to be imputed to the
extreme quality of the climates in which they dwelled.
The Tripartite or Noachid maps, also known as T-O maps, are
so named after their diagrammatic shape, which shows a circular, Oshaped ocean in which is inserted the letter T corresponding to the
three continents of the ancient world linked together. A variation on
the same associates the letter T with the three great waterways wellknown to the Ancients, i.e. the Mediterranean sea, the Nile and the
river Tanais (modern Don). Though pagan in origin, Tripartite maps
conveniently fitted in with Church teaching and the belief in a division
of the world after the Flood between the three sons of Noah (hence the
name Noachid) : Japhet getting Europe, Cham or Ham receiving
Africa, and Shem inheriting Asia. The letter T in these highly edifying
but not very realistic Mappae mundi was also fraught with symbolic
meaning, as its form recalled a cross, i.e. Christ’s cross. And indeed,
in most of these maps, Jerusalem, where Christ was crucified, was
placed right at the intersection of the three branches or continents.
These maps also greatly challenge our usual, Ptolemaically-received
orientation, as the top position in them is usually given to the east,
where a graphic representation of the Garden of Eden is frequently
placed. Such is the case for one of the most famous examples of a T-O
map, i. e. the Hereford Cathedral map, drawn between 1275 and 1317
Woodward (ed.), Five Centuries of Map Printing (Chicago and London : University
of Chicago Press, 1975), p.9.
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"All flat maps, and I am one"
by Richard of Haldingham3. Circular in form, with the east at the top,
it shows representations of Paradise, the Last Judgment, the Pillars of
Hercules and numerous biblical and other legends. Jerusalem is in the
center.
The rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman texts and maps
in the Renaissance (following the fall of Constantinople in 1453), the
discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in 1492 and the
subsequent exploration of the new continent and the South seas by
Vespucci and others, leading to Magellan’s circumnavigation in 1521,
gradually supplant this medieval world vision and ultimately result in
the birth of modern geography as we know it. To Italy belongs the
honour of being the first to revive an interest in classic geography,
with Ptolemy's Geographia being first printed in Bologna (1477)4, and
then in Rome (1478), Florence (1482) and Rome again (1490). In the
century and a half that follow, European geographical atlases keep the
Ptolemaic frame, but gradually add to it by integrating new
geographical data and do away with the picturesque but unscientific
monsters of the medieval maps to progressively adopt less allegorical,
more scientific standards. Maps belonging to this period of transition
interestingly blend fact and fiction, inherited legends and new
discoveries. A good example of such a phenomenon is provided by
Simon Grynaeus’ atlas of 1532 included in an edition of Sebastian
Münster’s Cosmographia universalis5. Here, the eastern coast of the
American continent is sketched most accurately, following the latest
finds of the European discoverers of the time, while the rest of the
continent is still a huge blank, waiting to be explored and charted. The
monstrous shapes and wonders of many medieval maps are still there
in the shape of naked, cannibal races, Scythian warriors, an elephant
and two basilisks, yet these legends are removed from the centre and
pushed back to the margins of the atlas.
The geographical atlases of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries well reflect a fascinating syncretic effort in front of the
scientific discoveries of the time, an effort which is by no means
limited to voyagers and cartographers. For history-makers and
mapmakers as well as for their armchair-travelling contemporaries,
the old beliefs recede but slowly, while new data is adapted so as to
coexist with, and as much as possible fit in a received world picture.
3
Reproduced in R. V. Tooley, Maps and Map-Makers (New York: Bonanza Books,
1949; 1970), p. 9.
4
Reproduced in Landmarks of Mapmaking, p. 51.
5
Reproduced in Nordenskiöld, plate XLII.
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Ladan Niayesch
Written mostly in the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first
two decades of the 17th century, the poetic works of John Donne well
illustrate this conceptual discordia concors.
Let us take as a first example one of the last poems written by
Donne, "Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness", composed either
during one of the poet’s serious illnesses in 1623 or alternatively
shortly before his death in 16316. Here the poet compares himself, as
he lies on his sick-bed, or possibly his death bed, to a flat geographical
map studied by his physicians who are compared to cartographers:
"my physicians by their love are grown / Cosmographers, and I their
map, who lie / Flat on this bed" (ll. 6-8), and later "In all flat maps
(and I am one)" (ll. 14).
The cartographic tradition drawn on in this poem clearly bears the
trace of the medieval T-O shaped maps corresponding to the division
of the world between the three sons of Noah, who are named here :
"Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem." (l. 20) The Tshaped form of the continents with the symbolic reference to the
crucifixion of Christ is also recalled here with the body of a dying
poet lying with his arms wide open : "We think that Paradise and
Calvary, / Christ’s Cross, and Adam’s tree, stood in one place; / Look
Lord, and find both Adams met in me." (ll. 21-23)
Yet for all its symbolic Noachid and Christian background, Donne’s
cartographic imagery has room for the latest scientific contributions.
Newly discovered territories are directly named here: "is the Pacific
Sea my home?" (l. 16), "Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar" (l. 18)7.
And if this metaphorical map is a flat one — "In all flat maps (and I
am one)" — it is solely for the sake of commodity, as this flat shape
actually stands for an acknowledged and accepted spherical reality:
"west and east / In all flat maps (...) are one" (ll. 13-14).
In modern maps what is figured at the extreme left is understood to be
immediately adjacent to what is to be found at the extreme right. The
poet adopts and adapts this idea to his situation by taking into account
all the symbolic weight of the west and east — the west being where
the sun sets, and thus metaphorically associated with death, while the
6
Edition used for this and all other quotes from poems by Donne: John Donne. The
Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1971 ; 1996).
7
Anyan is possibly a deformation of Annam, which was believed in Donne's day to
be located on a strait dividing America from Asia. See Smith's note on this in his
edition, p. 665.
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"All flat maps, and I am one"
east is where the sun rises, a place diversely evoking resurrection and
the siege of earthly Paradise: "As west and east / In all flat maps (and I
am one) are one, / So death doth touch the resurrection." (ll. 13-15)
Thus new discoveries are made to serve an age-old purpose, as the
poet tries to surmount his fear of death and annihilation with the
rational, scientific assurance that west and east, death and life are one
and the same according to the new discoveries.
With this assurance, he is ready for his voyage of exploration, even if
he knows his journey will lead him to death in dangerous straits —
"this is my south-west discovery / Per fretum febris, by these straits to
die" (ll. 9-10) — just as Magellan, the circumnavigator after whom
Magellan’s Strait was named, actually never finished his
circumnavigation. He died in the South Seas on the way back while
his one remaining ship was brought back to Europe by his faithful
lieutenant Sebastian El Cano.
Although drawing extensively on a medieval tradition, as well
as on modern cartographic discoveries, Donne in this poem, as well as
elsewhere in his poetry, does not seem so much interested in
geographic exploration as in an exploration of the Self, with its fear of
death and hopes of salvation. Here as well as in many other poems,
Donne is not taking sides in a scientific debate on the old and the new,
but using both sides for a reflection on the Self, which constitutes the
great subject of his poetry. "I am a little world cunningly made," he
writes in his Holy Sonnet 5. For him the macrocosm or larger universe
appears mostly interesting as a source of imagery to convey ideas on
the microcosm or the lesser universe of human body and mind.
At times, this complex, syncretic imagery leads him to what
John Carey calls "conceptual corners"8, i. e. unnaturally composite
images or meeting places for contraries, as in the famous opening
lines of Holy Sonnet 7 : "At the round world’s imagined corners,
blow/ Your trumpets, angels". If the world is viewed as round, how
can it have corners? This is a beautiful, typically metaphysical poetic
conceit, i.e. an intricate metaphorical figure which makes an ingenious
comparison between two apparently incongruous things or concepts.
The reference is possibly to the above-mentioned transition maps, in
the vein of Grynaeus’s map, with an ovoid projection of the world at
the center, surrounded by marginal figures and gloss on a rectangular
(cornered) sheet of paper. In many of these maps, the margins are
8
John Carey, John Donne : Life, Mind and Art (London and Boston : Faber and
Faber, 1981 ; 1990), p. 247.
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Ladan Niayesch
occupied, either by picturesque images of the wonders of the world, or
by winged images of blowing figures, alternatively representing the
different winds or heads of angels sounding a trumpet so as to remind
us that the end of the world is nigh9. This second version is probably
the one from which Donne draws his apocalyptic image: "At the round
world’s imagined corners, blow / Your trumpets, angels".
Back to the idea of voyaging and discovering, one must not
forget that in the context of the Great Voyages, exploration went hand
in hand with claiming and taking possession. A central image in
relation to this occurs in "A Valediction : of Weeping", in Donne’s
Songs and Sonnets. The image here is that of a cartographer pasting
sheets of paper corresponding to bits of maps on a round ball so as to
make a terrestrial globe : "On a round ball / A workman that hath
copies by, can lay / An Europe, Afric, and an Asia, / And quickly
make that, which was nothing, all" (ll. 10-13). The image here is that
of a blank, empty surface which is little by little filled by man’s
activity shaping and controlling it. The poet likens this image to his
beloved’s tears at his departure, as the world is reflected in her
transparent, round-shaped tear-drops. Here again, Donne’s conceit
appears first and foremost as a conceit of the Self. The tear-drop has
no interest in itself, just as the round, blank ball used by the
cartographer has no interest per se. The object gains meaning thanks
to the powerful hand of the explorer or cartographer adding to it the
latest discoveries of his mind. Likewise, the tear-drop shed by the
beloved is mostly used by the poet as a pretext, a mere mirror
reflecting the surrounding world in general, and the poet standing by
her side in particular: "Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere, /
Weep me not dead." The image here is mostly centred on the Self and
the prospect of self-annihilation in a falling tear-drop, rather than on
the beloved and the fact that she is crying.
The idea of exploration as a preliminary for possession
appears very topical in England in the last decades of the sixteenth
century with the beginning of the colonizing attempts of the English in
America. Indeed, the first temporary settlements in Virginia appear in
the 1580s, while Guiana is explored with a view to a possible future
settlement by Walter Raleigh in 1595. These colonizing efforts
incidentally result in an abundant travel literature in which new
territories are frequently likened to female bodies to explore and
possess. Such is the case with the very choice by Raleigh of the name
"Virginia", referring both to a virgin territory and to Elizabeth I, the
9
For examples of these, see Nordenskiöld's plates XXXI, XXXIII and XLIV.
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"All flat maps, and I am one"
Virgin Queen of England in whose name the territory was claimed.
This is not a new phenomenon. There are many earlier examples of
that in the history of travel, with such names as the Amazon, named
after those legendary ferocious females supposedly inhabiting there
according to Raleigh and other voyagers. Another example would be
provided by Columbus’s famous letter to his royal patrons, the
Spanish Catholic kings, in which he likens the new continent to a
female body. In his account, the protruding Brazilian coast is likened
to a woman’s breast, and Columbus locates the earthly paradise on a
point corresponding to the nipple10. In other words, right from the
start, the New World portrays itself as a locus for European male
fantasies of the female body, both in terms of what is to be enjoyed in
it (Virginia) and of the difficulty of its conquest (Amazon). Both
possibilities seem to be taken into account by Walter Raleigh in his
conclusion on Guiana: "To conclude, Guiana is a Country that hath
yet her Maidenhead."11
Donne’s Elegy 19, "To His Mistress Going to Bed", keeps a
trace of these fantasies. Yet, if in the works of the explorers and in
travel literature, it is the new land which is likened to a female body,
here the poet inverts the analogy for his own purpose, since this time
it is the female body which is likened to new territories : "O my
America, my new found land, / (...) My mine of precious stones, my
empery", he exclaims when dis-covering (taking the cover off) the
body of his mistress (ll. 27 and 29). The anaphoric repetition of the
possessive "my" foregrounds the male fantasy of absolute domination
over this body: "My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned"
(l. 28).
In this image, as well as in geographical reality, exploration
and domination present themselves as two faces of the same activity,
best brought together in the symbolism of a seal set on a map. In the
Renaissance, it was customary for explorers to carry maps on which
they charted new territory by giving it a name and marking it by
means of their own seals. A monarch’s seal was equally set at the
bottom of the royal patent delivered to the explorer undertaking
discovery and colonization in the King or Queen’s name. A trace of
both functions of the seal is to be found here, first in the image of the
10
Quoted by Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (London :
Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 183.
11
Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of
Guiana, in Selected Writings, ed. Gerald Hammond (Manchester : Carcanet, 1984), p.
120.
© Études Épistémè, n° 10 (automne 2006).
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Ladan Niayesch
poet’s mistress presented as a queen licensing exploration: "Licence
my roving hands, and let them go / Before, behind, between, above,
below." (ll. 25-26). Yet by the end of this section in the poem, the poet
is no longer claiming this newly explored territory in anybody else’s
name, but in his own name: "Then where my hand is set, my seal shall
be." (l. 31)
The image here is that of the explorer/master taking
possession of the female body, no longer by her licence and
permission, but by his own authority. The choice of the garments and
trinkets taken off by the mistress in this process of discovery appears
quite significant in relation with this exercise in domination and selfassertion. Indeed, luxury items such as the lace ("Unlace yourself", l.
9), the watch ("this harmonious chime", l. 9), and especially the
"coronet" (l. 15) worn by the lady denote an obvious social rank, and
this strip-tease appears as a pinnacle, both of worldly and of erotic
success on the part of a despotic lover ordering an apparently highranking but submissive woman to undress. This is a recurrent idea in
many of Donne’s love poems, even in the most celebratory ones
chanting mutual love but never forgetting hierarchy : "She is all states,
and all princes, I," he concedes at best in "The Sun Rising" (l. 21).
If in Elegy 19 Donne mostly associates voyages of discovery
with prospects of infinite gain and riches ("My mine of precious
stones, my empery", l. 29), elsewhere in his poetry he considers
another, less rejoicing side of such voyages as a source for his
imagery, especially in those images drawing on the topical, disastrous
northern expeditions of the 1570s during which Martin Frobisher and
others vainly sought a north-west passage to China in the Canadian
far-north12. The image is used in Donne’s Satire 3, a poem concerned
with both the necessity and the difficulty of finding the true Church, a
crucial question for the Catholic-born, yet gradually estranged young
Donne going through an agnostic, free-thinking period before an
uneasy conversion to Anglicanism sometime in the 1590s. In this
poem, Donne compares the path of righteousness leading to God to
one of those highly dangerous northern enterprises so as to show how
difficult it is to keep a constant course on this way : "Hast thou
courageous fire to thaw the ice / Of frozen north discoveries?" he asks
(ll.21-22). Here the light and fire of true faith are used to counter the
12
See the account of Frobisher's three northern expeditions in Richard Hakluyt, The
Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, ed.
Ernest Rhys (London : J. M. Dent, 1926), vol. V, pp. 131-170.
© Études Épistémè, n° 10 (automne 2006).
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"All flat maps, and I am one"
hardships of the world on a way which nevertheless stays open to
discovery.
The image of the frozen north seas reappears in another poem
equally fraught with geographic imagery, "The Good Morrow", in the
Songs and Sonnets. Here the poet compares his face and that of his
beloved to two hemispheres (as in a stereoscopic world map) forming
an ideal world – a world which has no room for the hardships of the
frozen north, a world on which the sun never sets: "Where can we find
two better hemispheres / Without sharp north, without declining
west?" (ll. 17-18)
Here, as elsewhere in Donne’s poetry, and most notably in
"Hymn to God my God" with which we started this reflection on
Donne's cartographic imagination, we notice that one of the key
features of the poet's exploitation of cartographic images is his
reduction or contraction of those images. If it is true that geographic
imagery is one of the most recurrent ones in Donne’s poetry, it is
equally true that more often than not, when the poet uses a cosmic
image, he uses it about a chamber, a bed, a body, as in "A Nocturnal
upon S. Lucy’s Day" in which we witness this process of contraction
in the first stanza. Here, in the short span of just nine lines, we move
from a cosmic level, with "The sun is spent" (l. 3), to the level of the
earth, with "The world’s whole sap is sunk" (l. 5) and "The general
balm th’hydroptic earth hath drunk" (l. 6), before ending with the
limited perspective of a bed: "to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk" (l. 7).
Similarly, the dramatic situations created by Donne are almost always
enclosed within a world focalized on a confined space, such as a
chamber, a bed which can alternatively be a death-bed as in the
examples of "Hymn to God" or "A Nocturnal" in the above-quoted
passage, or more optimistically a love-bed as in the conclusion of his
"Sun Rising" in which the poet rhetorically addresses the sun : "Shine
here to us, and thou art everywhere; / This bed thy centre is, these
walls, thy sphere." (ll. 29-30)
The title "An Anatomy of the World", given to the first
section of the First Anniversary (written in 1611 on the occasion of
the first anniversary of the death of young Elizabeth Drury), presents
itself as an epitome of this double interest. Indeed, for all its cosmic
imagery denouncing the vanity of universal knowledge, experience
and scientific discovery, the poem remains above all an "anatomy",
that is to say primarily a study, not of the vast world, but of a
dissected anthropomorphic body. Here, as in "Hymn to God my God",
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Ladan Niayesch
the map to be read and deciphered is a humanized body and the poet’s
interest remains focused on the human dimension of the universe.
All in all, Donne’s poetry denotes an undeniable familiarity
with the scientific discoveries and debates of the time. Donne as well
as other metaphysical poets participates in a general mood of
exploration by adopting and adapting scientific references in the
imagery of their poems. This mood of exploration is equally reflected
in many an ontological question in Donne’s poems, especially in the
incipits of several of his Holy Sonnets: "Thou (i. e. God) hast made
me, and shall thy work decay?" (HS1), "Why are we by all creatures
waited on?" (HS12), "What if this present were the world’s last
night?" (HS 13) Yet, as Robert Ellrodt reminds us, "Donne’s
‘metaphysical poetry’ is not a ‘philosophical poetry’: it never is the
exposition of a system."13
For all Donne’s interest in and frequent recourse to
hyperbolically universal, cosmic imagery, leading one critic to call
him a "Copernicus in poetry"14, his poetry is not a celebratory one
chanting scientific progress, exploration and the discovery of the
world. If Donne maps out the imagination and dramatizes a world in
his poetry, it is not a world in itself, but mostly, again in Robert
Ellrodt’s words, a "world-for-the-self"15.
13
Robert Ellrodt, Seven Metaphysical Poets: A Structural Study of the Unchanging
Self (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 122.
14
Anonymous, quoted by Carey, p. ix.
15
Ellrodt, p. 125.
© Études Épistémè, n° 10 (automne 2006).